Views alone are not important. Ogilvy usually designs videos for some kind of engagement or ‘post-click’ activity.

Owned is most important, then paid, then earned (clients tend to get this the wrong way round). Ogilvy stresses earned the least because it can be influenced, but not controlled.

Key goal is to “win the unbranded search”. Another key goal is “Post Play Interaction”, some way that the consumer can enter the sales funnel.

Comments on viral: ban the use of the word with clients, “viral is not a strategy, it’s a distraction", iit implies that success just sort of happens. Finally clients often mistake viral for ‘free’.

“No video earns mass viewing numbers without a trigger”. That trigger is rarely accidental; they are paid, owned or earned.

VSEO (Video Search Engine Optimisation) is crucial but often overlooked (YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine). VSEO requires well-crafted meta-data, at least until such time as video search evolves. Putting a brand or client name in the title often hurts in VSEO. Ogilvy uses video to dominate search.

They ‘pre-optimize’ videos, by finding out what consumers are likely to want before the video is created. They call this Consumer Intent Modelling (CIM). According to Ogilvy, CIM increases organic traffic 400-700%.

Pet peeve is the ‘Facebook phenomenon’, clients wanting ‘likes’ or ‘friends’ without knowing why. “I could make a video of a girl dancing in a bikini and get you 300,000 friends, but so what?”.

People wonder who’s at the top table. In reality, “everyone’s at a round table and the table spins every 2 minutes”. In other words, every party should be involved and the best idea wins, regardless of who came up with it. You need to leave your egos at the door.

Ritu Trivedi, (Managing Partner, Media Director) Mindshare:

“Just building content without a purpose and without learnings is a waste of time”. It’s critical to define very specific metrics with regards to branded entertainment; it keeps all parties honest, including the client.

Ross Martin, (Executive Vice President) MTV Scratch:

We all have figured out who we actually report to: the audience. If they’re happy, we all win.

For Millenials, “it’s all about gaming the system. It doesn’t matter where you put it [content], they will take it and twist it and do with it what they want to”. “They don’t fight the power, they are the power. And they know it”.

Kathryn Friedrich(Head of Display, Media and Entertainment) Google:

Need to move away from GRPs to a metric that factors in engagement.

YouTube’s homepage alone has 22 million views.

Sloan Broderick, (Managing Director) Mediacom Interaction:

[on the issue of multi-screen metrics]. There may be some clients who are given a ‘planning answer’ (e.g. the strategic importance of video), whereas others will want a ‘buying answer’ (i.e. more focused on economic arguments).

Brad Elders, Vice President of Video Sales AOL:

Destination alone is not enough; you need distribution and therefore syndication.

None of these are as bad as they were, and none of them are insurmountable.

Yoni Bloch, Interlude.fm

Interlude is a service that allows users to seamlessly ‘choose their own video’ by offering choices throughout the video. Users therefore create their own versions of the video, which encourages them to do two very important things:

Watch the video more times

Share ‘their’ versions with friends

Interlude’s stats show very high levels of engagement and watch-through rates.

Bismarck Lepe, President of Products, Ooyala

“Consumers are the new brand managers and the new programmers”.

Dell has how-to videos on their site. Customer satisfaction for the products that feature video on the help pages is up 20%.

80% of Vizio TVs can be connected; 70% of Sony TVs, and (by the end of 2011), 100% of Samsung TVs.

This will likely lead to a significant increase in consumers watching ‘the internet’ on their TV sets.